Sewing from Stash..Bring in the Clowns..

Who would have thought from a mess of solid charms...

And as for the old vintage dresses...one was silk and bled to death..donated, one was cotton..about to be cut up and buttons saved and the rest were not worth it..no matter how much fun I think I remembered having in those dresses???  Gone..thx for input..

Good to have a daughter!!!

From across the sea in Galway, Ireland came today a snippet from my girl, Emily!  Great to have a daughter.  She is keeping me modern:)

Thank you Emily...

Love love love the process

The solid charm scrap bag quilt is morphing...so much fun..

 Ten years ago our mother gave each of her daughters a hutch.  Charmaine got the family heirloom and I got this lovely one.  She was hoping we would thus display the family china......My mother has always been a dreamer:)  So 85% well gets me...a clean and organized hutch and my solid charm process blocks done.

85% well also gets me an improved disposition.  My family and friends are thrilled:)  It also will get me a part-time work schedule tomorrow..wish me energy...

Vintage?? Who me?

Yesterday when my son was here, I asked him to go up in the attic and get down a box of files from Miami that I needed to shred.  He couldn't find the box I needed, but he found this box labeled, "summer clothes".  Naturally we all thought that they were children's clothes.  Down came the box.  It was to my utter amazement that the box contained MY summer clothes from when I lived in Miami, almost 20 years ago.  I guess that I never missed them.  I just cannot believe this.  My 27 year old son declared that not even the Salvation Army would want these clothes as they look like a flower pot all old and stuff.  Two dresses I see were those when we graduated from grad school ..Lordy and  sigh...so definitely they are vintage. There is a lot of aging in 20 years and I am not what I used to be back then.  Most of them are rayon.  I still like the colors and wonder if I would cut some up for quilting.  I never use anything but 100% cotton...Anyone out there use rayon for anything?  I wonder if I should bother or just give them to Goodwill.

Below is the sweet Magnolia blossom...as I now live in the South:)

Quilt Process

How the brain works..amazing!   And we are all a bit different.  Here is a mess..and I mean mess of solid charms I had cut awhile ago...I decided to just start sewing two patches..then I decided these plain solids were boring...

 So, I added a black center.

 Loved that look of the 9 patch cut diagonally...and a quilt has begun with no idea of how it will turn out...soo exciting..

My husband is working tomorrow.  Guess what I will do...

Down home, free fun, better than any doctor or pill

Oilcloth fun..pouch

An accomplishment makes a nice day...started a bit fuzzy with my first outing since sick.  Saw my mother and was shocked with how she looked.  I do not know what I was thinking...that in three weeks she would have improved...be younger??  not have Parkinson's ...anyway sweet denial came to an end this morning, albeit a lovely visit.  Then I came home to rest waiting for my son and grandchildren since I had been too sick on Mother's Day.  Oh, no..he had a flat tire and could not come...sewing to the rescue again...I was eager to work with my new Oilcloth charm pack.  As with other charm packs, you get a nice variety with a smaller output of money.  I decided to use this tutorial to try putting nice ends on my zipper.  Interesting to try, but I found that with the oilcloth endings, it was all too bulky for a smooth finish.   I am delighted with the Done part and I think that using different patches of the oilcloth to make something new was great fun...

 I have on hand clear vinyl from Walmart.  I like the see through look.

 The little strip of oilcloth scrap at the end of the scizzor was nice, but did not work as I had thought.

 I was very happy to have my great selection of colored zippers.

Done and happy!

What a difference a day makes...

This midnight brings so much fun ( as opposed to last midnight!!!)...I am playing around with my new oilcloth scraps.  Cutting up the scraps, using my Teflon foot, I am sewing them together..just overlapping with a double stitch or decorative stitch, including some clear vinyl for fun...sigh...I am happy I have all those bright new zippers....

The light at the end of the tunnel...

This positive life brings 4 different types of Hydrangeas from my garden shown in Grandma's old coffee pot..

 It brings the first harvest of my jalapeno pepper for my homemade salsa..

 The excitement of my new mail today..fat quarters of laminate

 and...a big thrifty charm pack of oilcloth...so excited to create with all this.

Of course there is the report from my PCP today.  The lung x-ray and wheezing were negative so the infection is over.  He said that it takes awhile to recover from a serious illness and I need ...ugh..that word again...patience....As we left the office, my husband got a mean bone...he said we could always go by Mental Health to see if there was a new pill out for patience...I mean really!!!!  So doc said I should be better by Tuesday...which would be good since I have work scheduled all day on Tuesday..I cannot wait to get my life back!!

The midnight hour

It is safe at the midnight hour to be rageful...and that I am.  Today I called the asthma specialist at 12 because I was so done with being sick...left a message with some attendant for the nurse to call me back.  At 4:30 with no response, I called again...well there was no record of the first call and the staff all took half a day on Thursday, etc but I could talk to the triage nurse....15 min later the triage nurse informed me that the doctor and his staff were on vacation till Tuesday with NO back up physician...and patients should either go to the ER or their family doctor.  I was rageful then and it was not even midnight.  I made an appt with my PCP for tomorrow afternoon and burst into tears.  It was then that the house phone rang and it was my mother.  She had remembered how to dial my number.  But timing...I was in a fit and blurted it all out like I was five years old.  And, she acted like she was my 91 year old mother...soothing and sorry.  A gift at the right moment.  We had a delightful talk.

Tonight I finished the quilt for the hospital boy.  On the evening news last night there was a race car driver on the children's cancer ward with some of the adolescent boys.  I noticed that they had cool pillowcases and a quilt on the bed, not nicely folded but crumpled with love.  I was so delighted that I was working on this to ease someone's journey.

 The quilting on this is easy, just channel stitching with a little wiggle stitch in the middle..at best 70 min...

 At this hour, I decided to go outside and chill...I remembered the wine I had bought in October for my mother's funeral.  She missed the train, but I still had the wine.  I took some outside and tried to chill.  We have pine trees in our yard, at least 20 of them that are from 70 to 80 feet tall and beyond our fence into the woods there are more.  It was dwarfing..and then I saw the big dipper..how many years have folks been watching the big dipper...??  And then there was Great Aunt Carl's gardenia bush..20 feet wide and 10 feet tall that I had grown from a single cutting from her window sill in Greenville, Alabama...Perspective is coming..the miracle of life and my insignificance.  After two glasses of funeral wine..I decided to pretend I was a burglar looking in from the deck to my quilting room....can you just imagine what that person would think????

Quilting for the cure

"Twisted Scrap", gifted to Lauren.  Love you Lauren..get better quickly.

 When my newly delivered fabric from Fabric.com arrived at noon..I felt so much better...a shot in the arm for my mood.  Alas, it was not a shot in the lungs, so I have a call in to my pulmonologist. Patience is greatly overrated. 

Sipping and sliding back into childhood

Milito grew up on sewing.  At 14, he sits here while I have peddle to the metal whipping up this comfort quilt. Nothing much bothers him..He is king!

 Maybe it is the isolation??  Or maybe the steroids..I am slipping into childhood as the elderly often do...:)

 A friend of mine died last week.  She was 66.  She had been in a bee of ours for years.  At age 60, she entered the lock down unit of the Alzheimer's unit.  Early onset.....That shakes me up..so my new mantra...

I will be more mature tomorrow....maybe...

The big fix....retail or steroids??

This is how I feel.  Tomorrow is the last of 10 days on steroids and on antibiotics and I still feel like this.

 Not being one to suffer in silence (hence whining) or to suffer without reward..I ordered a few things to cheer me up!  This book came today...a delight.  This is my favorite way to work and Gwen does not disappoint in this book.  It has given me a boost already.

I also ordered a bit on Fabric.com.  Their $3.95 a yard Memorial sale is definitely within my budget, especially with free shipping.  And a bit of oilcloth.  Then there is the bra thing....I decided that I should have new bras.  Believe me, I would rather spend the money on fabric, but a lady has to do what she has to do.   I took the info off my favorite bra and googled the deals.  I found a place that was good, they had my bras and I ordered 4.  Then I saw the shipping.  It was $12.98.  Now I must share that I am not that well endowed that my bras would be that heavy for that much shipping.  So, I emailed the vendor and told them that I wanted to buy the bras but the shipping was too much.  Within seconds they sent me an email with a promo code for $1.98 shipping.  Way to go...

My husband is playing tennis again tonight and my bee meeting is cancelled... I guess I will baste my Three Stooges quilt and.....

Three Stooges saves the day!

Our Guild gets comfort and cuddle quilts mostly for women and girls.  There is a shortage for boys of all ages.  So, when I am making a quilt to give away, I try for the boy thing.  Also, I like to have quilts already made, on hand in case I need a gift.  Since I was working on this already...I was hoping for the boy.  I cut up so much fabric and messed around, ugh, made a mess...trying for the border to tie it all in and make it at least for either sex....and then I saw the half yard of Three Stooges fabric that had been sitting on my shelf awhile.

I had hoped that my Wednesday quilting group would help me baste this, but I had to cancel it again for tomorrow night since I am still not well.  There is progress.  Today I am 5% better than yesterday!!!!  No whining I said!  Plus, the Three Stooges makes me smile:)

I want to put this fabric on the back.  I should not have to worry whether or not it is "boy" enough..but I want whoever to like it....hmmm....Maybe it is bed time.

Feeling better one stitch at a time

There was a small turn around tonight  TBTG...so I celebrated with finishing the blocks on this comfort quilt.  As you can see, I am not sewing alone.  I am going to take down that nice ledge I made for the cats to rest on while they adjusted to the new dog.  I can see that Milito at least, would rather help me sew.

 This was not my next project, but once I started it was such smooth sailing....

 A person cannot be lonely while quilting!

Mother note:  My husband visited my mother again today and facilitated another Skype between us. She was in the bed, but in great shape mentally.  I asked her what she had done today.  She said that she had gone to a musical function and that it was a special only for the very old and decrepit and therefore she was invited.  And, she had a lovely time.

Just a little yard stuff to show...

We hired a friend to put a screened in porch on our house a few years back.  Before we hired him to also do the decks, my husband had thought of doing the decks himself, but he wanted to practice first.  In this far corner of our yard, nothing grew...it was a mud pit of weeds, totally unusable.  Mr. O'Quilts decided to put a "practice" deck there to assess his own skills and interest in doing the "real" thing. This is how we happen to have the most wonderful private vacation spot of our own...build around the existing trees.  It has become a standard joke with my financially prudent husband on holidays....eg, "Where are you taking me honey for our anniversary?".. I always know the answer....He nods to the back corner of our yard where we can have a lovely dinner for free:)  In the growing season, you cannot even see this spot from our house and yet it is right here in our yard.  Just sharing....